An abortion ban turned a grieving Allie Phillips into a candidate
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — Framed ultrasounds hang next to Allie Philips’s mantle, a shrine to the child she never had: delicate silver necklaces and receiving blankets embroidered with the name Miley Rose, beside a tiny pink urn containing fetal ashes.
It’s here, by the fireplace, where Phillips runs her in-home day care, greets her mechanic husband at the end of his workday and watches their daughter play with the family’s pit bull rescue. It’s also here where she’s coordinating her campaign for state legislature, motivated by the trauma of seeking an abortion while pregnant with Miley Rose.
Phillips had been overjoyed by the prospect of another little girl. Then, at about 19 weeks, a routine ultrasound revealed devastating problems: Amniotic fluid supporting the fetus had drained; its lungs, heart, brain and other organs were not developing.
Continuing the pregnancy would endanger Phillips, her doctor warned. But Tennessee’s near-total ban on abortion — signed into law some six months earlier — meant she would have to go out of state for the procedure. She temporarily closed her day care, left 5-year-old Adalie with her parents and flew to New York City with her husband. A stranger hosted them. GoFundMe donations covered their travel and medical costs.
Her loss not only turned the petite 28-year-old into a first-time candidate — challenging an antiabortion conservative in a fast-growing district on the Kentucky border — but into a committed activist, too. She is one of three dozen plaintiffs in state and federal lawsuits filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights against abortion bans in Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma and Idaho, among the most restrictive statutes in the country.
“We are in a fight for our lives,” Phillips told a rally outside the Tennessee Capitol on the first day of this year’s legislative session. “We cannot back down and hide away.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, women in conservative states have bucked the silencing stigma around abortion. One after another, they have shared their stories to challenge measures outlawing the procedure in nearly all circumstances, including when a woman’s life or future fertility is threatened. Some see running for office as an extension of that increased visibility.
“I’m running to protect women and girls and families,” Phillips says.
This unusual sisterhood includes candidates in Arizona and Georgia as well as Phillips’s fellow Democrat Gloria Johnson, a four-term state lawmaker and one of the “Tennessee three” who drew national headlines for joining a gun restriction protest on the House floor last year. She is recounting her own abortion while campaigning against U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R), who supports a national ban.
“The stories are personal,” notes Johnson, who as a married college student was diagnosed during pregnancy with an aortic aneurysm. She started speaking publicly about the procedure that saved her life because “there are so many instances where this is medically necessary.”
Phillips calls Johnson her “political mom.” Yet in the few months since she launched her bid for the House, the political novice has herself become a sounding board for other female candidates.
In Louisiana, which also prohibited abortion with few exceptions, Nancy Davis is planning to run for office because of what she went through in 2022 after learning that the fetus she was carrying had no skull. Doctors denied her an abortion despite the lethal anomaly, and she had to leave the state to terminate the pregnancy. Davis reached out to Phillips.
“If reproductive health care is important to you, running for school board isn’t the way to go,” Phillips advised her. “You want to be where you can make the change that you want to see happen.”
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/01/25/allie-phillips-tennessee-abortion-ban/
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